buying developers time to build the tools necessary to have retail come back

As we have already seen, every aspect of peer-to-peer digital cash that makes it an assault on the strength of the nation-state has been attacked, neutered, and infiltrated. Fiat currency is not going to go away quietly, and the general public goes along and will continue to go along with what the government tells them to do because it is safe, and people like to feel safe.

The moonboy mob goes along with the circus because the number continues to go upwards, and all the while the media implies that the usecase of a medium of exchange is a relic of the clumsy cypherpunk origins. Any hint of the counter culture that is an affront to banking is downplayed and smeared as crimes against anti-money-laundering legislation. In a word, their idealized future of peer-to-peer cash is an alternate form of Venmo—censorable, controllable, compliant.

What Saylor and company do to seduce the moonboy is to play up their fantasy, which is a hypothetical world dependent on the scarce asset of Bitcoin, with claims that the moonboy will be seated in the citadel, shielded from the unworthy nocoiners who must grovel at their feet for some spare sats to be thrown in their direction.

This leads us to what is perhaps the biggest lie peddled by cryptocurrency influencers—global adoption.

For many, this leap of faith is taken for granted. It’s inevitable, surely, that fiat currency will fail, that dollars will become useless, that all trust will be lost, and wheelbarrows of cash will be needed to buy loaves of bread.

It surely must happen that, one day, people will unanimously embrace cryptocurrency as their source of savings and income.

That the parasitic elites who have controlled our economies for hundreds of years will concede their political clout for the greater good. That the entire might of all nation-states will crumble under the power of Bitcoin, and they will bend the knee and declare that Satoshi is King, and that we will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya in a new era of peace.

I imagine there are readers who find my tone to be elitist, and I don’t disagree. Cryptocurrency as a whole is in need of criticism and introspection, especially from those who are staunch advocates of digital cash. How tiresome it is, watching the community from the sidelines, with so-called journalists and podcasters jockeying for relevance by shilling whatever cryptocurrency scam gives them attention or money.

But don’t confuse pretentious viewpoints with an unwillingness to help! If you happen to be suffering from a bout of moonboyism, yet you still have a shred of dignity, you will gradually become inspired to learn and improve, and along the way the privacy experts will be happy to point you in the right direction.

There have never been more resources to learn about privacy and how you can protect yourself, and it goes without saying that one of the greatest investments you can make towards your future is in your education of how to fight back against the surveillance state. Take it one step at a time, harden every facet of your opsec, and learn the enemy inside and out. And as time passes, you will stand alongside the other jaded cypherpunks who have become darknet market maximalists, scratching their heads in bewilderment while Saylor makes a fool of himself yet again before his mob of supporters.

The advocates of the store of value use case point to Gresham’s law, arguing that the hardest form of money will be removed from circulation. This would be fine if Bitcoin had characteristics of fungibility (it doesn’t), or if its security model wasn’t based on transaction fees (it is), or if there wasn’t a concerted effort to centralize the software that is used by Bitcoiners.

Cryptocurrency is dominated by moonboys, and the pied pier Saylor is a reflection of that. Considering how Saylor hasn’t been tarred and feathered by the Bitcoin community but rather exalted and embraced is all you need to know about the current state of affairs.

It’s a wonder why this fraud, with his billions of dollars, never thought to solidify the defense of Samourai Wallet or Tornado Cash with the best legal team money can buy.

Why isn’t he likewise helping spearhead a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill for privacy and freedom for those who use cryptocurrency as digital cash? Why does he only ever talk about buying Bitcoin and not being a reasonable individual who can occasionally take profits or use Bitcoin? You know the answer. It’s because he doesn’t care about Bitcoin, or freedom, or any of those things. The Saylor swindle is a game of musical chairs where the only winners playing are the ones lucky enough to get out while they are ahead. We are in the middle of the game now, which of course, is rigged for him to come in first place.

Within only several years, Saylor has hijacked Bitcoin to the point where he has become the defacto leader despite his vocal distancing from the libertarian philosophy cryptocurrency was built on.

an interview last year, Saylor declared his belief as to how Bitcoin’s medium of exchange is a dated concept and how Bitcoin custody should be left to the control of centralized exchanges, the same entities known for data collection and fractional reserve lending.

These shocking statements received several days of pushback on Twitter, with many cryptocurrency influencers crafting carefully worded tweets admonishing this rhetoric.

The result? Saylor posted a brief apology statement, and all was forgiven. How sweet it is to be king! The pied piper has enticed the moonboys with dreams of economic prosperity, and idealism be damned because now he has majority rule.

But for the darknet market maximalist, this is but a summary of how rotten things have gotten, a portrait of the desperate fantasy played out in the minds of the moonboys that one day they too will be in Saylor’s position, with thousands of underlings jealous of the success of their big-brained investing.

Saylor’s contributions to Bitcoin have been doubling and tripling down on the wretched mentality of “HODL” culture, which espouses that the only use case of Bitcoin is one of buying and holding on for dear life.

This creates an interesting paradox: how can Bitcoin be the future of money if nobody wants to actually use it?

The moonboy – “The darknet represents a time in the early days of cryptocurrency. We’ve grown past that. Yes, criminals use cryptocurrency on darknet markets, but there is so much more value that cryptocurrency can bring. The association is toxic.” The darknet market maximalist – “The darknet is the oldest and largest peer-to-peer market dependent on cryptocurrency, and observations of cryptocurrency usage in these battle-tested markets reveal what projects are considered the most powerful to study

To the moonboy, the preservation of liberties plays second fiddle to the growth of their investment, so any association with illicit activities is heresy. There is no reason for them to vocalize anything against the state, and when regulations come crashing down they will go in line with what they are told.

The darknet market maximalist understands that it is the goal of the state to promote the growth of moonboyism and to censor the dissidents and that playing nice is not worth it.

We have now defined moonboyism as a speculative mob that has distanced itself from the tenets of libertarianism. But how are they controlled? The moonboy, like moths to the flame, seeks out a leader who tells them that their greed is noble, and what better representative of this phenomenon than Michael Saylor, the pied piper of the moonboys?

Somewhere along the way, it’s difficult to say when, the counterculture became subverted. What was once a scary, upending technological discovery has shape-shifted into a sensationalist gambling vehicle. Gadsden flags have been replaced by price charts, and the cypherpunks are drowned out by social media influencers. Many of the old-timers still cling to the belief that the complete erosion of Bitcoin’s aura hasn’t occurred, that the collaboration with traditional finance is actually a good thing...

that applications for nation-state strategic reserves show maturation and legitimacy, and that escaping the so-called decrepit origins of the Silk Road means Bitcoin can finally become global money.

But we all know that is a farce, because what was once branded as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system has now become nothing more than a glorified tech stock.

and that by extension, if we imagine a situation that calls for a private and battletested form of digital currency, it would logically follow what is being adopted in underground drug economies.

1. So of the world underground drug economies... what % is actually using 'any' cryptocurrencies?
2. Do you think that Bitcoin (or crypto 'in general') is just a digital currency or digital cash? If there are only 21 million Bitcoins for 100 years... what incentive is there to spend Bitcoin if you have melting government-issued cash on hand?

The answer happens to be the individuals that make up these dark net marketplaces, because if cryptocurrency were to magically disappear, the underground internet economy would collapse overnight.

Uncensorable digital cash has made it so the average Joe can do things that are not approved by governments, and this has tremendous worldwide implications, such as the successful deterrent of things like price discrimination, data mining, or targeted advertising.

Despite the complete takeover of every mainstream financial instrument or medium, the state has little control over peer-to-peer cash node networks hosted by passionate volunteers around the world, and this isn’t the result of billions of dollars of investment by nation states, but by the determination of crypto anarchists embedded in open-source communities.

I must confide to the dear reader that the term darknet market maximalism is a tongue-in-cheek troll. I am fully aware that the outsider will read the title of this manifesto and immediately jump to the erroneous conclusion that we are all hell-bent on overthrowing the government, that we are all criminals, or perhaps even cyber terrorists.

They already brand us as the bad guys with something to hide, and for that reason we playfully acknowledge this, we lean into it, and we frame the conversation as to why free and open-source software would even have this stigma to begin with.

Because similarly, the explosion of darknet markets in the early 2010s caused an enormous amount of interest in Bitcoin. And so by bringing darknet market usage into focus, we add an edge to cryptocurrency that has been forgotten but is wholly necessary for the long term proliferation of parallel economies that threaten the status quo of fiat currency.

Before I finish this introduction, I would like to take a second to acknowledge the ones today who do use cryptocurrency, who do promote parallel economies, and who willfully push for adoption.

The overwhelming majority of cryptocurrency use today has become speculative gambling, and it is only going to get worse unless we push back.

The silly paradox is that after rebranding cryptocurrency into a friendly ecosystem that isn’t just for criminals, we’ve lost the world-changing intensity that made peer-to-peer cash so powerful in the first place.

And because of that, we must turn things back to their roots, and become darknet market maximalists.

Before we can understand why the darknet market maximalist is enlightened, we must examine the root of all of cryptocurrency’s problems—the moonboy.

The moonboy is a cypherpunk in name only, advertising their love for Satoshi in vain attempts to appear cultured.

They are fraudulent, arrogant, tribalistic, and gullible.

They are complacent and believe politicians with photoshops of laser eyes care about them. But here is the worst part of it—because of their insatiable greed, they become overleveraged in hopes of great material gain.

There are investors, for example, who encourage holding cold storage who are good people and valuable contributors to the community. The moonboy, however, is the vocal majority of cryptocurrency holders today, drawn by the volatile free market, which encourages the potentially “face-melting gains” that could let them become the next Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Even worse, while having this degenerate, gambling attitude, they believe they are acting from a position of virtue due to their endorsement of Satoshi and the now watered-down worldview that the early cypherpunks pushed for.

The moonboy is a hypocrite to their core, co-opting the term Bitcoiner to now mean pro-censorship and pro-state, so long as it guarantees the safety of their returns.

The moonboy – “We must do everything we can to become a global currency, even if it means endorsing proprietary software, because more people means my bags will be worth more.”

The darknet market maximalist – “Building parallel economies is the goal. If people aren’t interested in peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, that’s okay, but we should explain the benefits of peer-to-peer cash and lead by example.”

Q: And will crypto’s dominance continue to grow? A: Absolutely. Crypto’s going to continue taking over the global underground economy on transactions. There are people who think that crypto is going to go to the moon, but there plenty of people — Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett — who said pretty recently that they think crypto is just a scam. In the crypto chapter, I explain why that’s completely wrong. Because if the underground economy is 20% of global GDP that makes it — depending on the value of the dollar — a $20-to-$25 trillion economy. And if you’re providing the means of exchange, that’s a value proposition. Crypto has value. It’s used for transactions. There’s a big piece of the economy, which even if crypto’s heavily regulated, the government is going to have difficulty controlling. So it’s not worthless. There’s a lot at stake there.

Bitcoin has performed incredibly well as a SoV/speculative commodity- but my fear is that this is due in large part to a process of capture and control orchestrated by the bankers- they have increasingly commodified our P2P MoE, taken custody of it, frozen a growing portion of issuance from any possible use as a p2p MoE and tracked and traced the vast majority of BTC that is still held in citizens private custody.

By 'The bond market begs to differ' do you mean Bitcoins exceptional SoV performance has provided an alternative to nation states (eg El Salvador has doubled the USD denominated value of its BTC Treasury) or something else?

I was hoping El Salvador might start to issue BTC bonds and demonstrate a viable alternative to endless dependence upon the IMFs fiat debt slavery,. but this does not yet seem to have developed.

Bitcoin is not used hardly at all as a means of exchange- it is either outright banned, or slyly obstructed to the point of being effectively banned as it is in the 'liberal' western democracies via tax obligations requiring absurd and practically impossible transactions recording and assessment for all BTC MoE use.

For the vast majority of nation states Bitcoin adoption (for MoE) takes away far more from the government than it adds.

I am of course taking a critical and you might say pessimist view, but it does seem to be the trend as the almost complete lack of adoption for MoE anywhere, even in El Salvador suggests people will not choose monetary liberty even when a government allows it and Bitcoin offers that option.

I hope MoE adoption can and will happen, but fear not enough people want to be free. We shall see!

If the collapse of the USD causes Bitcoin to rise in value will Libertarians be happy?

Even if the fall of the dollar results in a very different world where it is most likely China has much more influence and power where trade and finance and international protocols and law are increasingly dominated by China.

Because the Bitcoin ecosystem is not even comparable to the Chinese economy.

The Bitcoin economy is almost exclusively that of a speculative asset- Bitcoin is not in reality a MoE with any depth or broad adoption.

All Bitcoin and 'crypto' would be in the event of the collapse of US hegemony, is primarily vehicles for wealth preservation outside of an increasingly Chinese dominated global economy.